I am currently running Mint Cassandra on my desktop all by itself. I have a laptop that has probably the laptop manufacturer's version of WinXP on it. The laptop is a Gateway about one year old. Some of the programs installed on Windows are still required, hopefully only until the end of this year...

Has someone written a good explanation of how to install Mint onto a Windows laptop or PC. I don't mean the one guy, Shaz or something like that, who's article appears many times when the topic is googled. His article is good, but he is NOT running Windows with Mint... He seems to be making assumptions...

I'm interested is some detail on partitioning the hard drive -- when and how to do it -- and installing NTFS-3g or similar program so Mint and Windows can live and maybe even work together without much fuss. (I don't expect perfection when were talking Windows.)

If the instructions/details are somewhere in this forum or on the Mint website, I haven't spotted them yet. I'm going to assume that Mint can work with a Gateway laptop. Running the LiveCD, I see a message on the black text boot screen saying something about some chip set that may be a 'situation'. Sorry, it went by very quickly and I didn't catch the exact verbiage but I think Mint didn't like the chip set...

I would very much appreciate any guidance, direction that you can provide. I am relatively new to Linux and have found Mint to be my OS of choice.

Yes. He is the chap who provided a very good description of 'how-to- install an earlier version of Mint onto a computer with WinXP BUT he does not have WinXP on the computer. I have a print out of this, however, was hoping that someone, somewhere had installed Mint on a computer WITH XP already running, as this is what I would like to do.

If Lazar's is the only or the best of what there is, then I'll give it a shot over this upcoming long weekend here. Yes, I've backed up all my important '.doc', '.xls', etc. I really don't want to make an attempt to reinstall or 'recover' XP on the laptop...

Meteor,
don't worry too much about xp, mint with the help of grub takes care of it. One word to the wise is that since you have been using xp for a whil, defrag your drive before you install mint.

The thing you need to be aware of is that before the installation process fully begins, mint will prepare your hard drive. In doing this it partitions the drive into sections to be used.
my partitions are shown in this post here.

When the installer begins your need to tell it what partitions you want to create or remain unchanged(i.e. manually editing your partitions). In my case, i created a boot partition, a swap partition and a home partition, leaving my already installed xp partition intact. This should be straight forward, lazar covers this window very clearly. Be carefull resizing the windows partition. Once you have partitioned the disk you need to tell mint, where you want the root directory and home directory to go.

once this is done you should be fine. after reboot, the grub should detect your mint and windows partition and allow you to boot into xp without any problems. mint will automagically mount the xp partitions and a quick google will find you windows drivers to read the linux partitions.

Yes - don't worry to much. Ok I am very computer savvy so... but I don't even see what the problem with dual boot is, I can't see any problems - apart from M$ problems like a fragmented drive that you can't defragment so that all the files are packed together. To often you find that most of the files are in the beginning of the drive/partition but some files reside a looong way in, making it hard to resize the Windows partition and thus a waste of space.
This I find, but not the dual boot itself...

Meteor: In windows I had made mistakes and had to start over, spending long hours sometimes because of a mistake I had made, and telling myself I wouldn't make that mistake next time.

However, while reading those forum posts I learned that there were many of us in your place (the place I was the first time) when we first decided we would take the plunge. I started the install that first time with some trepidation. I had read about partitioning the drive, number of partitions, mount points, etc., but man there were those memories from windows. I started the install and about 1/2 hour later I was up and running a dual boot XP and Linux OS. I found the post I left for you after switching to mint. It is a good one. Just to let you know how easy it can be: my 14 yr old daughter installed a dual boot (XP and Mint) first time, no problems. You should be happy with yourself in about 30 minutes!

For Ferus, Husse and newWE, thank you for your encouraging and, in the case of Fergus, detailed support. As we have a long weekend in my home country (Canada), I intend to "take the BIG step" Sunday to have Mint/XP on my laptop.

It's now 0800 Saturday morning in Western Canada and my wife has provided my "other duties as assigned"...

I'll let you know how the install goes, hopefully written from my laptop.

As others have stated, the installer, partitioner and grub take care of everything with minimal effort on your part. Just be aware that any time you are messing with hard drive data structures (MBR & partitions) there is a chance of data loss.

The Linux partitioning tool is pretty reliable. However, if you have any valuable data you really should do a backup before messing with your disk structure. An image backup would be best, but at least a file backup of the most important stuff should be done.

newW2 wrote:I'm in you time zone, and will be watching for you success story.

Well, here it is some time a lot later than I thought I would be working on this. I decided to wait for Celena and then do the install onto my Gateway lapatop. I've now had her up and running for three days and, except for a couple of situations with typos in setting up Thunderbird, all seems to be running fine. The whole process took about 35 minutes from the time I booted the LiveCD until I was able to reboot and see the GRUB choices I had. Default is, of course, Mint with kernel something-or-other, another Mint choice, some type of 'Other' choice, Windows XP and another choice. Mint will boot if you leave it go, of course.

Windows works as well as Windows ever works and it doesn't seem to have been affected by this change in any way. I really like the fact that Celena boots in about a third the time Windows does.

This message is being done on my laptop in Celena.

My only concern is that I have no functioning printer attached to Celena. There is a thread in the Printing sub-section on the forum concerning the installation of my Canon Pixma iP4200. With the responses that I've received, I hope to have it connected to Celena later this week.

Cassandra is still running on my desktop computer and awaiting installation of a number of 'upgrades', again. I'll get around to doing that, sometime...

Thanks to all in the forum for your encouraging words and am very pleased that Celena/Mint installed so easily. It was a great feeling to succeed!

I have Celena and XP on a desktop and a laptop in a dualboot setup. When I did both machines, did fresh installs on both machines of both OS's.
On the laptop I put both OS's on one hdd splitting a 40 gb drive in half and using a Gparted live cd to format both halves. after partitioning, I did Windows XP first. The reason for this is that if installed last Windows will take great delight in overwriting GRUB which will render linux inaccessible. Then, with linux, I just followed the prompts and went on with the install.
On the desktop I used a different approach. I put each OS on its own hdd. I like this method best. Same procedure as above; Windows first, then linux. Just follow the prompts for each OS.
Dualbooting might seem intimidating but it's not that bad. Most of the work is done by the install cd's. You just need to be sure you push the right buttons when prompted by the cd.
If you are setting up a dual boot with a Windows install you've had for a while with a lot of stuff you want to keep, Defragment Windows and backup everything you want to keep before resizing the Windows install to make room for linux.